5 Non-Obvious Ways to Eke More Conversions from Your Landing Pages

And that's particularly true with the advent and affordability of landing page builders, access to high-converting templates, and more articles on landing page optimization then you could read in a lifetime.

It’s rare that you’ll come across a landing page that blatantly defies best practices, especially if it’s on the receiving end of high-priced PPC traffic.

That’s why this article isn’t about how to optimize your landing pages for conversion, it’s about how to squeeze more value out of your already high-performing landing page.

If you’re ready to get the most out of your landing pages (and PPC spend), then I have five ways to eke even more conversions out of your landing pages today.

1. Auto Select Form Fields

Take a look at the image below. Do you notice anything different about the two landing page forms?

On the surface they may appear to be the same, but there is a subtle but important difference between the two. The first loads with none of the form fields selected, while the second loads with the email field pre-selected.

Why is this important?

In the second version of the form users are able to land on the page and instantly start typing.

This delivers a similar experience to when your arrive on Google, Dictionary.com, or even Craigslist:

These companies understand the power of simplicity when optimizing for user experience and conversion. We prefer things to be simpler and converting made as straightforward as possible.

At Wishpond, we tested out this concept a couple of years back on one of our product landing pages. The only difference between the two pages was enabling an auto select form field option on the variation:

To add an auto-select form field option to your landing pages, simply add this code to your pages’ javascript with “form” being the name of your form, and “form_field” the name of the field you want selected:

Your form markup should include names for each element as well:

Alternatively if you’re using a landing page builder you can enable an autofocus feature which bypasses the coding process.

2. Exit Popups

What’s the first thing you think of when you think of a popup?

Is it an annoying box that appears over a web page, interrupting your browsing experience?

It doesn’t have to be. There are a number of different popups which can be triggered based on visitor behavior in order to convince people to convert.

Exit popups, or "exit intent" popups, work by adding a small snippet of javascript that can detect when a user’s mouse is attempting to leave a page.

Once it detects this, software automatically serves up a targeted popup addressing any concerns or objectives that may have prevented a user from converting or caused them to want to leave.

Exit popups can also be used to prompt users toward a lesser conversion goal like lead generation or 1-on-1 demos. This can include things like whitepaper downloads on consultation pages, or consultation prompts on pricing pages.

Take a look at an exit popup that we use at Wishpond on our pricing page:

Our pricing page is such a high-value and bottom-of-the-funnel page, any additional conversions that we can derive from the page are extremely valuable.

Crazyegg utilizes a more top-of-the-funnel exit popup to promote a newsletter subscription:

Regardless of how you use an exit popup, if setup correctly, it is guaranteed to help squeeze more value out of your landing pages.

3. Remarketing

When marketers think about optimizing their PPC funnels, the first thing they think of might not be remarketing. But, similar to how adding an exit popup can help capitalize on traffic that's about to bounce, remarketing can help take advantage of the traffic that did bounce.

The reason this is important is, especially if you're paying top dollars for highly competitive keywords (sometimes in the range of $50 - $100), and your landing page is converting on average at 20%, then that means that 80% of the traffic you paid tons of money for is gone forever.

Remarketing can help retrieve these users for up to 100x less than what you paid initially.

Take a look at some of the average costs of remarketing from WordStream’s customers as of 2015:

We see an incredibly low CPC, especially when compared with competitive keywords in that industry that can sometimes amount to over $50 per click.

4. Surveys

There are two ways to determine how effective your landing pages are. The first is through examining quantitative data: things like total number of views, conversions, time on page. The second is through qualitative data: user feedback, usability testing, heatmap tracking, etc.

The problem is that most marketers are so focused on quantitative data (optimizing for numbers), that they forget to optimize for experience.

This can result in a disconnect between your landing page content and the reader on the other side of the screen. After all, do you know what their primary pain points are? How sure are you that the information you're providing is making it clear what you provide?

One way to get to the bottom of this is to use website surveys. Surveys can be triggered similar to popups, but appear much less obtrusively, often to the side or the bottom of the screen.

5. Post-Conversion Prompts

In marketing, you need to strike while the iron is hot. And nothing's hotter than a lead who has just converted on one of your landing pages.

One mistake that marketers make is not optimizing their post-entry processes to take advantage of freshly converted leads. These are people who have just expressed interest in one of your offers and are primed to receive relevant lower-funnel conversion offers.

There are two primary ways of prompting people for a secondary conversion: your landing page's post-entry page, and through an automated follow-up email.

Here's an example of a webinar post-entry page from Instapage that prompts users to subscribe to their blog.

Infusionsoft does something similar when they prompt users who download one of their ebooks to register for a free live demo.

They then reinforce this secondary CTA by sending a follow up email with the same "choose a demo time" prompt.

So what's the key takeaway?

Don't leave money on the table by driving traffic to a blank post-entry page or by not taking advantage of your follow-up post-entry emails.

Post-conversion prompts are some of the best ways to capitalize on your pre-existing conversions and can help eke that much more out of your PPC spend.

TL;DR

Even if you've spent months optimizing your different landing pages for conversion, there's always a couple new tricks that can help squeeze out a bit more value – and therefore improve your PPC ROI.

To recap, those are:

Auto-select form fields

Exit popups

Remarketing

Surveys

Post conversion prompts

Ready to eke some more value out of your landing pages?

About the author

Kevin Ho manages Partnership Marketing at Wishpond, a platform designed to help marketers run amazing social campaigns. He is a contributor to Social Media Today, Convince and Convert , and Social Media Examiner. Connect with him on Twitter @mayoshrimp